Raúl: A very traditional Spanish kid
CHAPTER 23
The Vulture Squad and Raúl
In late October 2010, some two thousand fans gathered in the Salto de Caballo, a municipal stadium (capacity five thousand) on the outskirts of the once-imperial Spanish city of Toledo to watch a charity match between a team of Real Madrid veterans and the local soccer club. Some well-known Madrid stars who had long since retired from the game muscled in, more for fun than hard work, but with a hint of strutting arrogance, like privileged, overgrown schoolboys. Their opponents were a ragtag collective of physically rather less healthy and underpaid individuals, downtrodden representatives of CD Toledo, a club that had never gotten beyond the Third Division since joining the Spanish league after the Civil War. Amid the beer paunches and ruddy faces, Real Madrid’s Emilio Butragueño, a small, trim figure with the chiseled handsomeness of a middle-aged Robert Redford, directed play from midfield with distinction, his quick and accurate passing and positioning of the ball as well as killer instinct near the goal a constant threat to the ragtag defense of the amateur hosts and an inspiration to the veterans and onlookers alike.
Soccer fans in Toledo, like much of the country, were still basking in the memory of Spain’s recent World Cup win, and the crowd had come in no mood to see a simple kick-around. Thanks to Butragueño’s enduring skills and work ethos, they were treated to an entertaining spectacle well worth the money they had given to the Catholic charity Caritas. Butragueño’s grace on the field, his deft touch with the ball, and his intelligent positioning off it, was watched by a predominantly young crowd of reverential fans. Butragueño’s gentle artistry contrasted with the imposing architectural severity of the nearby Alcazar, the military museum—a former barracks—that during the 1930s had been the setting for one of the bloodiest encounters of the Civil War. Spain, like its soccer, had entered the modern era. The veterans beat Toledo 9–0.
My friend Inocencio “Chencho” Arias, a Spanish diplomat and Real Madrid fanatic, even in his busiest periods as a government official based in Madrid during Butragueño’s heyday in the 1980s, tried to see every game in which he played. “It was like following a famous matador—you had to hurry and see Butragueño for fear that an injury like a bull’s goring might deprive you of relishing his art forever,” said Chencho. “He played four and a half good years, but he had something few players in the world have—an ability to play with the ball in a very reduced area that electrified the fans. In my case, he’d make me cry with sheer emotion.”
The Dutch international Leo Beenhakker, who managed the great Real Madrid team of the late 1980s, once praised what he called the ruthless winning streak he encountered in Spanish soccer compared to the creative yet underachieving school of Dutch soccer favored by Cruyff and others. As he told David Winner:
Every Dutchman has an opinion about everything. When you go to a hotel with the Dutch, one player says “Hey, it’s too big,” and the other says it’s too small. “It’s too hot,” “It’s too cold,” “It’s too. . . .” We are busy with everything, ev-er-y-thing! But when I went to a hotel with a Spanish team—and they’re all big stars, Hugo Sanchez, Butragueño, Gordillo, Michel, Camacho, Santillana, Juanito, great players—they come and it’s: “Ok, this is fine. Where’s my room? OK. Bye.” They sit quietly and they don’t talk about the bus, and about the driver and the driver’s wife. No! Come on! They think: “We are here to play a soccer match. We play and we kill them. And then we go home.” That’s the difference.
Beenhakker was speaking ten years before La Roja may have suggested a different thesis. He was right at the time—up to a point. That generation of Real Madrid players expressed the spirit of La Furia at its most effective. But to watch El Buitre (The Vulture) play for Real Madrid at his peak was to experience the excitement of a new generation of players full of creative ideas. They were a mirror image of the outpouring of new cinema, theater, art, and media during Spain’s transition to democracy—the so-called cultural movida, or movement—which represented a liberation of mind and body from many of the taboos imposed by the Franco regime. Was there a connection between the soccer and the cultural “revolution”? Yes, in soccer terms, it meant style and spirit, as well as success. Leo Beenhakker may have believed in aggressive, attacking soccer, but he was no Captain Villalonga clutching a military manual. La Furia had entered the modern era.
To watch El Buitre, nicknamed thus because of his predatory instinct, was to follow his swerves and acceleration through defenders, his explosive speed inside the penalty box, an ability to reach, in a split second or two, a place where you least expected him, and to create a goal out of nothing. He forged the core of an inspirational soccer quintet, named after him as the Quinta del Buitre, literally translated as the Vulture Squad. The five others were Manuel Sanchis, Rafael Martin Sanchez, Miguel “Michel” Gonzalez, Pardeza, and Martín Vázquez. As Sanchis told me, “We were young guys from Madrid who shared a similar view on how soccer should be played—we wanted it to be bold and attacking—and we saw ourselves as part of what was happening in Spain, more widely at the time, part of a generation that wanted change, that was prepared to take risks.”
It was the mid-1980s. The first socialist government in Spain in more than a half century was reaching the end of its first term and was about to be reelected on a manifesto of deepening democratic and social reform based around the country’s protracted admission into the European Community. During the late 1970s the arrival of Johan Cruyff as a player had raised FC Barcelona’s profile and popularity, making it the cool club, soccer at its most creative and bold when Barcelona itself was enjoying a major cultural revival. In May 1979 FC Barcelona won the European Cup Winners’ Cup, beating Fortuna of Dusseldorf 4–3. By contrast, Real Madrid had dragged its feet culturally and socially, with the Bernabéu stadium for a while turning as gray in spirit as the concrete slabs that supported its structures. Worse, between 1982 and 1984, with the Bernabéu stadium still tainted as the stadium where Spain lost the World Cup, Real Madrid was in danger of making its reputation for invincibility look like a bad joke. The old player and legend Di Stéfano survived just two seasons before being sacked as Real Madrid coach when the club finished as runner-up in the league championship but failed to win any trophies.
A new postwar generation of Real Madrid fans, who had watched Di Stéfano play as young boys, had grown up disillusioned with the club’s inability to repeat those glory days. They suffered instead the humiliation of seeing Barca lay claim to being more in step with the country’s overwhelming desire for change. Then in May 1985 Real Madrid caught up with Spanish society and appointed as president of the Spanish “White House” Ramón Mendoza, three years after his candidacy had been rejected by the club’s old guard.
Mendoza, a controversial businessman, blamed his earlier defeat on dubious tactics employed by a self-serving conservative clique within the club and their right-wing political allies. They included leaks to the media, emanating from Spanish intelligence sources, suggesting that he had been employed as a Russian spy by the KGB while trading with the Soviet Union during the latter years of the Franco regime and alleged to at one point have helped finance the Spanish Communist Party. Britain’s secret service, MI6, and the CIA shared suspicions about Mendoza’s political links at a time when Spain was settling in as a relatively young member of NATO. What is certainly true is that Mendoza shared a drink with the legendary communist, veteran firebrand of the Spanish Civil War La Pasionaria, while she was in exile in Moscow and helped publish the Spanish translation of Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs.
Yet Mendoza’s buffoonery was perhaps best epitomized by his self-description as a “political independent with a full belly.” Certainly, his reputation as a political opportunist may provide an explanation as to how he managed eventually to take power at Real Madrid. Once in the hot seat he continued to make some questionable allies. For example, he openly courted Madrid’s hooligan pack—the Ultra Surs—finding in FC Barcelona president Núñez a willing sparring partner who was only too happy to stir up the antagonism between the two clubs. On one occasion Mendoza accompanied a group of Ultra Surs to the Barajas airport in Madrid, to greet a Real Madrid team after a game against Barca. President and fans together chanted abuse at Catalonia.
Mendoza never quite fulfilled his dream of enjoying the international high profile of two of his greatest friends, the Italians Silvio Berlusconi and Gianni Agnelli, who so skillfully exploited their political, business, media, and soccer interests to forge, for many years, an unrivaled power base, at least in their own country. Mendoza’s silvery gray hair was on the long side, he dressed in flashy jackets without a tie, he liked fast cars, intelligent women, and partying, and he was, for a while, a most suitable and influential addition to a new cult of dazzling celebrity spawned by the power-bloated socialist government. More important, he was appointed on a pledge to reverse the declining fortunes of Real Madrid.
Mendoza’s most positive legacy is that under his presidency the Quinta del Buitre—the Vulture Squad of young Spanish players led by Butragueño—was allowed to flourish from its early beginnings in the club’s youth teams, even if Mendoza may have been motivated by a need to save money on expensive foreign players. La Quinta became hugely popular for a while and connected not only within itself but also with other players of different personality and background, as well as undoubted talent. Such was the case of the agile Mexican-born Hugo Sánchez who coined the phrase Quinta de los Machos—the Virile Squad—just to remind the fans that Spanish soccer had not abandoned La Furia. Sánchez relished provoking opposition defenders and goalkeepers as well as their fans—an attitude that won him the fervent support of the Ultra Surs.
For years Real Madrid had lacked what its rival FC Barcelona seemed to have built from early times into its DNA: a sense of itself, its history, its place in society, its style of soccer that could puncture the myth perpetuated by its enemies that it was a club who owed its claim to greatness and its popularity to Franco. Only after Franco died did the club begin to develop a counternarrative capable of reaching out to a broader fan base that not only took pride in the soccer achievements of the past in a way that depoliticized them but also laid claim to an enduring and privileged presence in the heart and soul of Spanish soccer.
Emilio Butragueño had passed his peak when another Spanish star, Raúl González—popularly known as simply Raúl—rose in his footsteps. Raúl was born in Madrid in 1977, three years after David Beckham was born in Leytonstone and seven years before Fernando Torres was born. Raúl played as a junior with Atletico de Madrid before moving to Real Madrid in 1992 at age fifteen. At the time, Cruyff’s FC Barcelona was the team everyone wanted to watch in Spain.
Raúl contributed to Real Madrid’s greatness and became a pivotal figure in the national squad, just as El Buitre had been. What separated the two stars were temperament and circumstances. Of the many tributes that have been made to Butragueño over the years, few have been as eloquent as that made by his teammate Michel, part of a group of Spanish players that in their heyday were as loyally supportive as a band of brothers. “His talent lay in intuition, in the always intelligent spark of his play. . . . His time was perfectly structured. The ball didn’t surround him day and night. He found it quite easy to disconnect from the sound of soccer, he was untroubled by the media. . . . Perhaps there were people who would have liked to have seen him more involved in his profession, but Emilio was genuine and unique. He had his own personal vision of what soccer should be.”
Whereas El Buitre was infused with zen, Raúl sweated through his shirt like a fundamentalist. Whereas El Buitre felt himself to be one more on a team, Raúl took his role of captaincy very seriously—in the eyes of some of his teammates too seriously. They found him pesado (hard work). He provoked confrontations and simmering resentments in the locker room. These became more acute at Real Madrid, with the imposition by club president Florentino Pérez of his galactico model, yearly superstar foreign signings, and endless managerial changes that led to clashes of egos and fueled resentment among the aspiring homegrown talent. Part of Raúl’s problem was that he was a very traditional Spanish kid who at Real Madrid ended in the deep end of soccer as a global money-spinning enterprise with its sponsorship deals and endless media events.
It takes a thick skin and a steady mind to survive in a soccer environment where Spain’s two biggest clubs each have two sports mass-circulation dailies print up to ten or more pages on each every day. Add to that the coverage in television, radio, and other broadsheets, and it’s constant Judgment Day. Raúl functioned but in a way that denied him El Buitre’s popularity.
In June 2002 Raúl’s record at the club level among the players attending the World Cup in Japan and Korea marked him out as a special case. Turning twenty-six years old, Raúl had won three European Cups, two Spanish Championships, and scored more goals than any other player in the Champions League and for the Spanish national side. A profile of him at the time by author and journalist Simon Kuper asserted, now that El Buitre had long retired, that at the highest level of the game there was no more proven game winner than Raúl, who “may confidently be expected to keep performing the way he is now, or better, for another five or six years.” Kuper wrote, “If there is any love or loyalty behind those eyes [of Raúl] it is only his inner circle of family and one or two friends who know about it. Otherwise he is humorless, pitiless, calculating and ferociously single-minded. Think Al Pacino in The Godfather. The one who systematically annihilates his enemies as his child is being baptized. That’s Raúl.” My fanatical Real Madrid friend Chencho Arias put it somewhat differently. “He had balls. He played his heart out and surprised people with his devil’s trickery.”
Raúl scored his first goal for Real Madrid on November 5, 1994, one week after making his debut on the team, in a 4–2 derby win over Atletico. Over the next fifteen years he would go from promising youngster to Real Madrid’s joint top scorer of all time, along with Di Stéfano. Having played alongside and outlasted the likes of Zidane, Ronaldo, Figo, and Roberto Carlos at the Bernabéu, the number 7’s status as a los merengues legend seemed beyond doubt.
Certainly, there were moments destined to live long in the collective memory of Real Madrid fans: his part in May 1998 in ending the club’s thirty-two-year wait for another European Champions’ Club title in the renamed Champion League as part of team that beat Juventus in the final 1–0; the moment, celebrated to this day in the club’s more militant fan clubs, when following a crucial equalizer against FC Barcelona he celebrated by lifting his finger to his lips and quite literally reducing the Camp Nou to a stunned silence; that same season when despite his club missing out on the La Liga title, he was crowned his country’s Pichichi, or top scorer; and the final goal he scored in his club’s 3–0 Champions League victory in the all-Spain Champions League final against Valencia in May 2000, when after receiving a long pass from Savio well inside his own half he ran the length of the field before dribbling around the goalkeeper—not just any goalkeeper but Canizares, a Spanish international and among Europe’s best—and stroked the ball into the net. Five weeks earlier, in the second leg of the quarterfinal against Manchester United, Raúl, still aged only twenty-three, had lit up the night at Old Trafford with a brace of brilliant goals, earning from Alex Ferguson the rare accolade of “the best player in the world.” Two seasons later, in 2002, Raúl was one of the goal scorers in Real Madrid’s 2–1 victory over Bayer Leverkusen, the club’s ninth European Cup success and a new record. Raúl’s reputation had grown as a proven game winner. He had the ability to turn a game around, thanks to his rock-hard single-mindedness and what Jorge Valdano called his “insolent self-belief,” qualities he employed for the sole purpose of winning.
To his most loyal fans—who saw the true native Spanish Real Madrid player as the personification of the traditional values of Spanish nationhood, Raúl was totemic and thus untouchable. When the player celebrated sweet moments of conquest like in the victory over Valencia in the Champions League in Paris, he did so by taking a bullfighter’s cape and showing that he was both a matador and a torero, a killer and fighter.
Yet in October 2007, in a season during which he captained Real Madrid to a league title, thus ending a three-year major trophy drought, he was dropped from the national squad just before a game that could make or break Spain’s qualification for the European Championship.
In a thirteen-year career, Raúl had won five league titles, three European Cups, and two Pichichi awards, but he was no different from any other Spanish player in that during this time he had never won anything with Spain. This fact divided Spanish fans between pro- and anti-Raúlistas, a debate that for a while seemed as irreconcilable and destructive as that which had led the country to civil war. The fact that Raúl’s form had markedly deteriorated just as his identity as a player had been lost in a Madrid put in the hands of foreign superstars mattered little to those who had mythologized him as the latest version of their knight in shining armor.
Chencho Arias claimed to have cried only three times in his life: at the funeral of the Spanish Jesuit priests murdered by a death squad in El Salvador, the final scene of some movie he’d seen in New York, and the goal Raúl scored during the 1998 Intercontinental Club Cup against Vasco de Gama of Brazil in Japan. Clarence Seedorf had struck a long pass from midfield, from right to left. Raúl received the ball, controlled it perfectly with the left foot, beat one defender, next another, before pushing it to his right and striking it home to clinch the trophy. “Proust’s exquisite cake was cattle shit compared to what I relished in that moment—Real Madrid in all its glory,” recalled Chencho.
But such memories had faded fast among those who instead of looking back were looking toward the future to see if Spain’s reputation as Europe’s great underachiever could be corrected. Luis Aragonés became the first Spanish coach to act on the basis that if La Roja was to succeed, he could do without a player that in addition to no longer being able to hit the target had a reputation for alienating teammates and celebrating too often his own personal achievements. At his prime Raúl proved himself an instinctive lock picker and could be trusted to take up his own position anywhere in the forward area. But he lacked El Buitre’s good grace and selfless artistry. Spain had to move on without Raúl. To that extent Raúl’s rise and fall marked a period of transition for Spanish soccer: when a new generation of players took over from the old and the best lessons learned at the youth and club levels were transferred to the national team.
